Updating Your Online Portfolio
If you feel like you are the victim of Hermionie Granger’s “Petrifioustotalus” spell when you go to update your online portfolio, you aren’t alone. We don’t have a spell to relieve you of the immobility you might be experiencing in updating your online portfolio. However, we do have three keys points that will remedy your portfolio paralysis.
3 Key steps in updating your Online Portfolio
1. Your Perfect Client
It’s not a new concept. In fact, it’s one of the oldest in the book of marketing. Figure out who your perfect client is and address all images and copy to her eyes. Pammy the Perfect Client is out there waiting for you. Think of her and what images she would most be drawn to.
LingWangPhotography.com by Hannah Robinson
2. Less is More
The number one mistake people make when compiling their online portfolio is feeling the need to share EVERYTHING. #Oversharing. When you are thinking about Pammy the Perfect, think of what she would want to see. You can take an exact number to narrow down the number of images per gallery. If you decide 7 is the number of images you want, then you will be able to hold yourself accountable to ensure you are staying on task and on target. So, for example, if you are a wedding photographer and only do wedding photography in your home town, choose 7 to 10 images you believe your ideal client will love. On the other hand, if you shoot weddings, engagement sessions, and destination weddings, you can have three galleries (mini portfolios) per specialty with 7 images each.
TresBeauWeddings.com
3. Nothing is permanent.
This is not some sort of existential mumbo jumbo. You are the curator of your own website. It is not a social media platform where some company may or may not own your work. It’s your work. If you decide those images displayed in the gallery of your online storefront do not suit your brand anymore, take em down. Put up new ones. If you want to try a few out – you can. Sit back and look at them, invite some friends to give you feedback. Rearrange them for a week. Just get it done. Your future clients are looking to connect with you.
TerriBaskin.com
Bonus
ComePlum.com
If you have two specialties in your business that have nothing to do with the other and don’t know what to do, we have the answer. Two separate online storefronts. You can either have two separate domain names. This is a great idea if you want to keep the businesses separate in design and audience.
If you would like all your hard work to funnel into two different ventures in audience and SEO, you can keep them together. One Showiteer, Praise of ComePlum.com, decided to funnel her audiences to two different online homes, but under the same URL.
Come Plum’s Greeteaing Cards
How did she do this without piling more work on top of an already full list of small business owner responsibilities? In Showit, the simplest way to do this is by using our +sites like Praise did.
On another platform, you would want to just make another page and copy and paste accordingly so there is an obvious uniformity of brand per page. Just make sure alignment is consistent as the potential client will be jumping from one site to the other. Limited eye-jostling is always preferred.
